^
2012 The world did not end ! The 13th baktun of the Mayan calendar
begins. Since
the world did not end yesterday at the end of the 12th baktun, as
the Mayas had predicted, there has to be a 13th baktun, and this is
its first day. The Mayan date is therefore:

2003 Rigged presidential election in Guinea, from which
all other candidates, except one from a marginal party, abstain in protest.
Dictatorial president Lansana Conté, in office since seizing power
in a coup in 1984 (and “elected” in 1993 and 1998), is “elected”
again. In 2001, made-to-order changes in the Guinean Constitution allowed
Conté to seek a third term and lengthened it to 7 years from 5. Gravely
diabetic, he may well die before the term is ended. On 19 December 2003
the International Crisis Group reported the political situation in Guinea
as being in "a state of alarming uncertainty," citing the potential for
a future military coup and well-armed movements of unemployed veterans of
West Africa's recent wars. Guinea's military is divided by ethnic rivalries,
that so far have been kept in check by the government. Conflicts in neighboring
Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast have flooded Guinea with refugees,
who could well be recruited into future conflicts. Guinea has not relieved
the desperate poverty of its masses, despite its natural resources: gold,
diamonds, and a third of the world's reserves of bauxite. These riches are
a mixed blessing, because the greed for natural resources has been a principal
motive for civil wars in the region. Human Rights Watch has recently accused
Guinea of providing arms to the Liberian rebels “Liberians United
for Reconciliation and Democracy” for use in attacks on Monrovia in
July 2003.

^2000 Teacher creativity breeds trouble.
A Japanese junior high school teacher
came up with a killer of a test question for his pupils, but parents
were not impressed. What are two legal ways to bump off your
spouse?" was the question on the students' end-semester health exam.
Outraged parents called the principal of the school in Nara, western
Japan to complain, prompting an explanation and an apology, Japanese
media said today. The 51-year-old male teacher, the school said, had
been simply trying to see if the kids understood that smoking, excessive
drinking and eating too many fatty foods were behaviors which, if
encouraged, were a recipe for an early demise.

^1998 Microsoft asks for more time to alter Java Microsoft asks a district court
judge for more time to meet the court's specifications regarding the
Java programming language. The judge had imposed a preliminary injunction
giving Microsoft ninety days to alter its version of Java to conform
to Sun Microsystems' specifications. Sun had alleged that Microsoft
had undermined Java's ability to run on any platform by writing special
extensions to the language that made certain applications perform
better on Microsoft's browsers than on Netscape's. Microsoft claimed
that the ninety-day period was not enough time to comply with the
order and asked for an additional month. However, the following February,
a judge ruled that Microsoft would be allowed to create its own independent
version of Java, as long as the company did not use Sun's code.

^1996 Jobs gets job back at Apple
In a dramatic reversal, Apple announced
on December 21, 1996, that prodigal founder Steve Jobs would return
to the company. Jobs had left Apple in 1985 to found NeXT Inc., after
Apple president John Sculley stripped Jobs of his responsibility for
the Macintosh division. Jobs had helped found the company in 1977,
encouraging his computer hobbyist friend Stephen Wozniak to build
a computer he could sell to hobby shops. By 1979, Apple Computers
had become the fastest growing company in history, worth more than
$1 billion. In 1979, Jobs led a team of several Apple developers on
a visit to Xerox PARC, where the team saw the Alto, an early computer
with a graphical user interface, a mouse, and built-in networking
capacity. Key elements of the Alto found their way into the Apple
Macintosh, released in 1984. After Jobs left Apple, he formed NeXT
Inc. and became president of Pixar animation studios. On this day
in 1996, Apple announced it would buy NeXT and that Jobs would return
to the company as an adviser. His triumphant return to power was complete
in the fall of 1997, when Jobs was named interim CEO of Apple.

1995 The city of Bethlehem passed from Israeli to Palestinian
control.

^1994 Intel accepts Pentium returns Responding to a deluge of bad
publicity, Intel reversed its policy and said it would replace Pentium
chips with no questions asked on this day in 1994. The November 7
issue of Electrical Engineering Times had announced a bug in the Pentium
chip that could produce mathematical errors. Intel officials admitted
they had known about the flaw for some time but thought it so unlikely
to cause problems that they did not disclose the problem. Initially,
Intel said it would replace flawed chips only if users showed they
engaged in computer work that might be affected by the error. Customers
attacked Intel for its position, and in early December, IBM said it
would halt shipments of IBM Pentium computers. Bowing to customer
pressure, Intel relented and adopted a no-questions-asked return policy.
Ironically, six months later, only about three percent of customers
had requested a replacement chip.

^1988 Junk bond firm pleads guilty of securities fraud The once high-flying junk bond
firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., pleads guilty to charges of mail,
wire, and securities fraud. As part of the settlement, Drexel agreed
to hand over a record $650 million in fines, as well as to cooperate
with authorities in their ongoing investigation of other Wall Street
figures. Drexel in fact helped snare one of its own fallen stars,
Michael Milken, as the firm provided evidence that helped mount a
damning case against the deposed junk-bond king. Thanks to his former
firm, Milken was indicted in 1990 on nearly one-hundred counts of
racketeering. Nor was the outcome of the scandal particularly kind
to Drexel. Indeed, the firm's finances had already been hit hard by
the waning junk bond market of the late '80s; the mammoth fraud settlement
further depleted their rather barren coffers. In February of 1990,
Drexel filed for Chapter 11.

1986 500'000 Chinese students gather in Shanghai's People's
Square calling for democratic reforms, including freedom of the press.1984 José Antonio Ardanza Garro es elegido presidente
del Gobierno vasco en sustitución de Carlos Garaikoetxea.1979
The US Congress approved $1.5 billion in loans to the financially threatened
Chrysler Corporation in an effort to save the battered automotive giant.
President Jimmy Carter signed the bill on January 7, 1980. Under the stewardship
of Lee Iacocca, Chysler rebounded quickly. By the late 1980s the auto maker
was posting record profits. 1976 UN General Assembly
passes a resolution declaring 1979--Year of the Child 1973
Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, US & USSR meet in Geneva 1972 Soviet Union signs a separate peace with East Germany

^1972 Eight B-52s lost during Christmas Bombing so far.
The Defense Department announces that
eight B-52 bombers and several fighter-bombers were lost since the
commencement of Operation Linebacker II on December 18. These losses
included at least 43 flyers captured or killed. President Richard
Nixon ordered the operation after the North Vietnamese negotiators
walked out of the peace talks in Paris. In response, President Nixon
immediately issued an ultimatum that North Vietnam send its representatives
back to the conference table within 72 hours "or else. When
they rejected Nixon's demand, he ordered a full-scale air campaign
against Hanoi and Haiphong to force them back to the negotiating table.
On December 28, after 11 days of intensive bombing, the North Vietnamese
agreed to return to the talks.

1971 UN Security Council chooses Kurt Waldheim as 4th
secretary general (on his 53rd birthday), not realizing he has been a Nazi.

^1969 Thailand to withdraw its troops from Vietnam.
Thailand announces plans to withdraw
its 12,000-man contingent from South Vietnam. Thai forces went to
Vietnam as part of the Free World Military Forces, an effort by President
Lyndon B. Johnson to enlist allies for the United States and South
Vietnam. By securing support from other nations, Johnson hoped to
build an international consensus behind his policies in Vietnam.
The first Thai contribution to the
South Vietnamese war effort came in September 1964, when a 16-man
Royal Thai Air Force group arrived in Saigon to assist in flying and
maintaining some of the cargo aircraft operated by the South Vietnamese
Air Force. In 1966, in response to further urging from President Johnson,
the Thais agreed to increase their support to South Vietnam. The Royal
Thai Military Assistance Group was formed in Saigon in February 1966.
Later that year, the Thai government, once again at Johnson's insistence,
agreed to send combat troops to aid the South Vietnamese government.
In September 1967, the first elements of the Royal Thai Volunteer
Regiment, the "Queen's Cobras," arrived in Vietnam and were stationed
in Bear Cat (near Bien Hoa, north of Saigon). The Thai regiment began
combat operations in October 1967.
In July 1968, the Queen's Cobras were replaced by the Royal Thai Army
Expeditionary Division (the "Black Panthers"), which included two
brigades of infantry, three battalions of 105-mm field artillery,
and an armored cavalry unit. In August 1970, the Black Panther Division
was renamed the Royal Thai Army Volunteer Force, a title it retained
throughout the rest of its time in South Vietnam. The decision by
the Thai government to begin withdrawing its troops was in line with
President Nixon's plan to withdraw US troops from South Vietnam as
the war was turned over to the South Vietnamese. The first Thai troops
departed South Vietnam in 1971 and all were gone by early 1972.

1968Apollo 8 is launched on a mission to orbit
the moon.

1964 Great Britain's House of Commons votes to ban the
death penalty. 1963 The Turk minority riots in Cyprus
to protest anti-Turkish revisions in the constitution.

^1958 De Gaulle wins 7-year term as French President.
Three months after a new French constitution
was approved, Charles de Gaulle is elected the first president of
the Fifth Republic by a sweeping majority of French electors. The
previous June, France's World War II hero was called out of retirement
to lead the country when a military and civilian revolt in Algeria
threatened France's stability.
A veteran of World War I, de Gaulle unsuccessfully petitioned his
country to modernize its armed forces in the years before the outbreak
of World War II. After French Premier Henri P tain signed an armistice
with Nazi Germany in June 1940, de Gaulle fled to London, where he
organized the Free French forces and rallied French colonies to the
Allied cause. His forces fought successfully in North Africa, and
in June 1944 he was named head of the French government in exile.
On 26 August 1944, following the Allied
invasion of France, de Gaulle entered Paris in triumph. In November,
he was unanimously elected provisional president of France. He resigned
two years later, however, claiming he lacked sufficient governing
power. In 1947, he formed a new political party that had only moderate
electoral success, and in 1953 he left politics.
In 1958, however, a revolt by French colonists in Algeria led to a
severe political crisis in France, and de Gaulle agreed to head a
new emergency government. Considered the only leader of sufficient
strength and stature to deal with the perilous situation, he was made
the virtual dictator of France, with power to rule by decree for six
months. A new constitution of his design was approved in a national
referendum in September, and on 21 December he is elected president
of the Fifth Republic. During
the next decade, President de Gaulle granted independence to Algeria
and attempted to restore France to its former international stature
by withdrawing from the US-dominated NATO alliance and promoting the
development of French atomic weapons. Student demonstrations and workers'
strikes in 1968 eroded his popular support, and in 1969 his proposals
for constitutional reform were defeated in a national vote. On April
28, 1969, Charles de Gaulle, at 79 years old, retired permanently.
He died the following year.
Après qu'une Constitution sur mesure aie été
ratifiée par référendum le 28 septembre. Les
23 et 30 novembre les élections législatives ont envoyé
à la Chambre une majorité gaulliste. Ce jour, ce sont
80'000 notables qui élisent donc le premier président
de la Vème République et de la Communauté française.
Quelques jours plus tard, à la télévision (monople
d'Etat), le 28 decembre, le général de Gaulle assure
: " Guide de la France, et chef de l'Etat républicain, j'exercerai
le pouvoir suprême dans toute l'étendue qu'il comporte
désormais.

1948 State of Eire (formerly Irish Free State) declares
its independence.1946 Juan José Gerardi Conedera,
born on 27 December 1922, is ordained a priest of the archdiocese of Guatemala.
He would become a bishop on 30 July 1967. On 26 April 1998, he would be
murdered by Guatemalan military officers, two days after presenting a report
on the murders and other human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan
military.1944 German troops surround the 101st Airborne
Division at Bastogne in Belgium. 1937 1st feature-length
color and sound cartoon premieres (Snow White) (Snow
White the book) 1933 Dried human blood
serum 1st prepared, University of Pennsylvania 1933
Newfoundland reverts to being a crown colony 1928
President Calvin Coolidge signs the Boulder Dam bill. 1923
Nepal changes from British protectorate to independent nation
1921 US Supreme Court rules labor injunctions
& picketing unconstitutional.1911 Se otorga al escritor
español José Echegaray Eizaguirre el orden del Toisón
de Oro.1919 Holanda concede asilo político
al kaiser Guillermo II.1910 Over 2.5 million plague
victims are reported in the An-Hul province of China. 1908
Andrew Carnegie, who monopolized the steel industry and promoted the cause
of unfettered "Individualism," implores the US Congress to "take back their
protection; we are now men and we can beat the world. However, Carnegie
failed to avoid steep tariffs being passed into law. 1909
University of Copenhagen rejects Cook's claim that he was 1st
to North Pole.1901 Por primera vez, las mujeres
participan en las elecciones comunales, en Noruega. 1898
Scientists Pierre & Marie Curie discovers radium
1891 18 students play 1st basketball game (Springfield College)
1880 En France, Camille Sée, républicain
proche de Jules Ferry, impose une loi qui crée les externats pour
les jeunes filles. La gymnastique y est obligatoire.1879El New York Herald anuncia que Thomas Alva Edison ha inventado
el alumbrado por electricidad.

1863 Skirmish at Hunter's Mill, Virginia

^
1861 Trent crisis escalates
Lord Lyons, the British minister to the United States, meets with
Secretary of State William Seward concerning the fate of James Mason
and John Slidell, Confederate envoys arrested by the US Navy aboard
the British mail steamer Trent. During the meeting, Lyons took a hard
line against Seward and forced the Lincoln administration to release
the Confederates a few days later.
The arrest of Mason and Slidell on November 8 near the Bahamas triggered
a major diplomatic crisis between Britain and the United States. The
British had not taken sides in the American Civil War and they accepted
any paying customers wishing to travel on their ships. When Mason
and Slidell were arrested, the British were furious that their ship
had been detained and their guests arrested. The British government
demanded their release. The Lincoln administration refused, and the
Americans waited for the British reaction. The British stood firm
by their demand and prepared for war with the United States.
After Lyons met with Seward, he wrote
to Lord Russell, the British Foreign Minister. "I am so concerned
that unless we give our friends here a good lesson this time, we shall
have the same trouble with them again very soon," wrote Lyons. "Surrender
or war will have a very good effect on them." The Lincoln administration
got the message, and Mason and Slidell were released within a week.
"One war at a time," Lincoln said. The Trent affair was the most serious
diplomatic crisis between the two nations during the Civil War.

^1826 Republic of Fredonia declares its independence
from Mexico Five
days earlier, in an act that foreshadowed the American rebellions
to come, Benjamin Edwards rides into Mexican-controlled Nacogdoches,
Texas, and proclaims himself the ruler of the Republic
of Fredonia. The brother
of a corrupt backer of an American colony in Texas, Benjamin Edwards
made the bold (and perhaps foolish) decision to rebel against the
Mexican government while his brother was away in the United States
raising money for his colony. Under the empresario system--which was
created by the Mexican government in the 1820s to encourage colonization
of its northern provinces--men like the Edwards were allowed to settle
Anglo families in Texas. However, many of the Anglo settlers retained
stronger ties to the United States than to Mexico, and Benjamin Edwards
hoped that many former Americans would support his attempt to split
from Mexico. Accompanied by a force of about 30 men, Edwards seized
a stone fort in Nacogdoches and declared that the new "Republic of
Fredonia" was now independent of Mexican control. Edwards claimed
his new nation extended from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande River,
and would be governed under the principles of "Independence, Liberty,
and Justice. In a bid
to build up a defense against the Mexican soldiers who were on their
way to quell the rebellion, Edwards quickly negotiated an agreement
with the Cherokee Indians offering to share Texas in exchange for
military aid. Edwards was less successful in winning the support of
the local Anglo and Mexican inhabitants of Nacogdoches, in whose name
he was supposedly acting. When the Mexican militia approached Nacogdoches
six weeks later, Edwards' ill-planned revolution quickly disintegrated
and he fled to the United States for sanctuary.
While short-lived and premature, Edwards' Fredonian Rebellion nonetheless
reflected the growing tensions between the American colonialists in
Texas and their Mexican rulers. Less than a decade later, in 1835,
other Texans followed in Edwards' footsteps and staged the far more
successful revolution that established the independent Republic of
Texas.

The Fredonian
Rebellion was a dispute between the Mexican government and the Edwards
brothers, Haden and Benjamin.
Haden
Edwards received his empresarial grant on April 14, 1825. It entitled
him to settle as many as 800 families in a broad area around Nacogdoches
in eastern Texas. Like all empresarios he was to uphold land grants
certified by the Spanish and Mexican governments, provide an organization
for the protection of all colonists in the area, and receive a land
commissioner appointed by the Mexican government. He arrived in Nacogdoches
on September 25, 1825, and posted notices on street corners to all
previous landowners that they would have to present evidence of their
claims or forfeit to new settlers. This naturally offended the earlier
settlers. Edwards's grant was
located in a difficult part of the country. To the east was the Neutral
Ground, inhabited mostly by fugitives; to the north and west were
Indians; to the south was Austin's colony; and in Nacogdoches itself
were the remnants of previous filibuster expeditions that had failed.
The number of grants actually in question was probably very low. According
to General Land Officeqv records,
thirty-two had been made before 1825. Furthermore, in only one case
was someone's land actually sold to someone else. But Edwards's behavior
was threatening and served to polarize the old inhabitants against
the new. An election for alcaldeqv
in December provided the occasion for the factions to express their
opposition. Samuel
Norris was the candidate for the old settlers, and Chichester
Chaplin, Edwards's son-in-law, was supported by the new. After
the voting Edwards certified Chaplin's election to political chief
José
Antonio Saucedo in San Antonio. Norris's supporters challenged
his claim and charged that the voters in Chaplin's support had come
from unqualified voters. Saucedo reversed the election in March 1826
and ordered archives and duties to be surrendered to Norris. The controversy
did not settle down, and by the time the news reached Saltillo and
federal authorities in Mexico, Edwards appeared to be unwilling to
abide by their terms, so in mid-year 1826 the grant was declared forfeit.
Edwards was outraged, and he found support in the settlers he had
brought. On November 22, 1826,
Martin Parmer, John S. Roberts, and Burrell J. Thompson led a group
of thirty-six men from the Ayish Bayou to Nacogdoches, where they
seized Norris, Haden Edwards, José Antonio Sepulveda, and others
and tried them for oppression and corruption in office. Haden was
released, and in fact his inclusion in the group may have been to
cover up his participation in the attack. The others were tried, convicted,
and told they deserved to die but would be released if they relinquished
their offices. Parmer turned the enforcement of the verdict over to
Joseph Durstqv and proclaimed him
alcalde. As soon as Mexican
authorities heard of the incident, Lt. Col. Mateo Ahumada, principal
military commander in Texas, was ordered to the area. He left San
Antonio on December 11 with twenty dragoons and 110 infantrymen. It
was clear to Haden Edwards that his only chance to make good the time
and estimated $50'000 he had already expended on his colony was to
separate from Mexico. He and Parmer began preparations to meet the
Mexican force in the name of an independent republic they called Fredonia.
Since they planned to include the Cherokees in their move for independence,
the flag they designed had two parallel bars, red and white, symbolizing
Indian and white. In fact, although a treaty was signed with the Indian
leaders, Richard Fields and John Dunn Hunter, that support never materialized.
The flag was inscribed "Independence, Liberty, Justice.
The rebels signed it and flew it over the Old Stone Fort.qv
Their Declaration of Independence was signed on December 21, 1826.
Haden Edwards designated his
brother Benjamin commander in chief and appealed to the United States
for help. Ahumada enlisted Stephen
F. Austin who sided with the government, and Peter
Ellis Bean, the Mexican Indian agent, headed for Nacogdoches.
When the Mexican officers and militia and members of Austin's colony
reached Nacogdoches on January 31, 1827, the revolutionists fled and
crossed the Sabine River. The Indians killed Hunter and Fields for
involving them in the venture.

1809 Rendición de Gerona tras seis meses de asedio
por los franceses.

^1799 William Wordsworth moves into Dove Cottage William Wordsworth, 29, and
his sister Dorothy move into Dove Cottage in Westmoreland, England,
not far from the home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge
had been good friends and colleagues since they met, in 1795. Their
collaboration flourished, and in 1798 they published Lyrical Ballads,
with a Few Other Poems, launching the Romantic movement. The book,
which included Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's
Tintern Abbey, sold out within two years. The book's second edition
included a preface by the authors, which became an important manifesto
of Romantic poetry. Wordsworth
was born near England's Lake District on 7 April 1770. He lost his
mother when he was 8 and his father five years later. Wordsworth attended
Cambridge, then traveled in Europe, taking long walking tours with
friends through the mountains.
While studying in France in 1791, he fell in love and had a daughter.
Intending to marry the mother, he returned to England to straighten
out problematic financial matters, but a series of events prevented
their reunion. During his 20s,
Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy and developed a close working
partnership with Coleridge.
In 1802, after years of living on a modest income, Wordsworth came
into a long-delayed inheritance from his father and was able to live
comfortably with his sister. That year, he married their longtime
neighbor Mary Hutchinson and had five children. The poet's stature
grew steadily, though most of his major work was written by 1807.
In 1843, he was named poet laureate of England, and he died on 23
April 1850, at the age of 80.
WORDSWORTH ONLINE: The
Complete Poetical Works (HTML at Bartleby)
co-author (with Coleridge) of:Lyrical
Ballads (multiple versions of the first edition, with commentary)
(HTML, SGML, and page images) Lyrical
Ballads, with a Few Other Poems

1790 Samuel Slater opens the first cotton mill in the United
States (in Rhode Island.) 1784 John Jay becomes
1st US secretary of state (foreign affairs) 1708
French forces seize control of the eastern shore of Newfoundland after winning
a victory at St. John's.

^1620 (11 December Julian) 103 Mayflower pilgrims land
at Plymouth
Rock The
small band of persecuted Christians had left England three months
earlier and had had a difficult two months crossing of the Atlantic.
At times storms tossed the little Mayflower (as well as the
stomachs of the pilgrims) becoming so fierce that the main deck beam
of the ship broke and they almost perished. At other times the sea
was so becalmed that the ship and its weary passengers sat motionless
in the water for days. In spite of all hardships, however, the Lord
was with them and they reached land by the middle of November. Miles
Standish and his scouts then began to methodically explore the Massachusetts
coast to find the best place for a settlement. They finally decided
upon Plymouth, and the Pilgrims at last disembarked on December 21.
What was in their minds as they began life in their new land? Their
future governor, William Bradford,wrote of their experiences. Here
are some of his comments: "They had now no friends to welcome them,
nor any inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies, no
houses or much less townes to repair to...And for the season it was
winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to
be sharp and violent, & subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous
to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides,
what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of
wild beasts & wild men?...which way soever they turned their eyes
(save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content
in respect of any outward objects...If they looked behind them, there
was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main
bar and gulf to separate them from all the civil parts of the world...What
could now sustain them but the spirit of God and his grace?"

1553 Refugees from England are helped by Mennonites
(led by failed Catholic priest Menno Simonsz) at Wismar (on the Baltic,
in Holstein); their leaders repay their rescuers with an attack on their
theology. 0069 Titus Flavius Vespasianus, a gruff-spoken
general of humble origins, enters Rome and the next day is confirmed by
the Senate as emperor (already proclaimed such by his troops on 01 July).

2008
Nicole Isabel Castro [20 Dec 1981–], she died in her sleep,
possibly from an overdose of the drugs prescribed for her bipolar condition.
She was a parishioner of Our Lady of the Assumption parish in El Paso, Texas.
—(081229)2006 Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov (or
Saparmyrat Atażewiç Nyżazow)Turkmenbashi(“Father of Turkmens” the name he gave himself, egotistic
Communist dictator of Turkmenistan since 1985 (as 1st Secretary of the Turkmen
Communist Party, then, since 21 June 1991, as President), born on 19 February
1940. —(061221)2005 Eric Manny, 35, California
traffic policeman in a patrol car which overturns during a chase on Interstate
Highway 5 between Los Angeles and Bakersfield. —(060807)2004
Twenty-seven persons at Ilado, Nigeria, by explosion and fire of
a pipeline which they had perforated to steal fuel. —(061226)2004 Twenty-two persons, in a 12:00 (09:00 UT) explosion
by a suicide bomber of Ansar al-Sunna, which shoots pellet shrapnel through
the large lunch hall tent at “forward operating base Marez”
at the airfield of Mosul, Iraq, where US occupation and Iraqi puppet National
Guardsmen were waiting for lunch. The dead include 13 US soldiers, 3 Iraqi
soldiers, and 5 US civilians, besides the suicide bomber. 69 persons are
wounded. Apparently the US forces never learn to avoid large concentrations
of people whom the terrorists like to kill. 2004 Six persons
when, at 02:00 (23:00 UT 20 Dec), US warplanes hit Hit, a town in Anbar
province, Iraq, in its eastern neighborhoods Jamaiya and Sinai. 9 persons
are wounded.2002 Two Afghan children on the ground and all
seven Germans soldiers:
Capt. Friedrich Deininger, 53;
Junior Sgt. Frank Ehrlich;
Main Sgt. Heinz-Ullrich Hewußt;
Main Sgt. Bernhard Kaiser;
Main Sgt. Thomas Schiebel;
Main Pfc. Enrico Schmidt;
1st Lt. Uwe Vierling; 31;
aboard a helicopter which crashes near Kabul, Afghanistan after
catching fire. The Germans were soldiers of the Iinternational Security
Assistance Force for Kabul (4800 soldiers including 1250 Germans). Their
military helicopter was a Sikorsky CH-53 “Sea Stallion”. —
(051108) 2002 Sgt. Steven Checo, 22, in a fight
started near village Shkin in Paktika province, Afghanistan, at 04:00 when
his patrol of the US 82nd Airborne Division approached a suspicious group
of some eight men, who ran away and then turned and fired. This is the 16th
US serviceman killed in Afghanistan since the US attacked al-Qaeda and the
Taliban in 2001, and the first on since Sergeant Gene Arden Vance, ambushed
and killed by al Qaeda suspects in the same area on 19 May 2002. In this
campaign, the US military has been very successful in limiting its own deaths,
while seeming indifferent to the deaths of thousands of allied Afghan fighters
and innocent civilians, not to mention the enemy.2002 Hanin
Abu-Samah, 12, Palestinian girl, shot in the leg, in the afternoon,
by Israeli troops who were in a gunfight with some Palestinians, in Rafah,
Gaza Strip.2002 Glen
Seator, falling from the roof of his three-story house. Born
on 05 June 1956, he was a so-called “sculptor” who became known
for such works as his 1997 B.D.O., an office salvaged from the
remodeling of a building, tilted at a 45 degree angle; or his 1999 remodeling
of an art gallery into a check-cashing store..2001 Five Palestinians,
in gunfight started by mourners at the funeral of a 17-year-old
Islamic Jihad supporter firing at the Palestinian police station of the
Jebaliya refugee camp, Gaza Strip. Police officers return fire. The battle
goes on for more than an hour, despite appeals from mosque preachers and
the head of Islamic Jihad in the camp.The dead include at least two Islamic
Jihad gunmen. About 55 persons are wounded. The al-Aqsa intifada body count
now exceeds 840 Palestinians and 240 Israelis. 2000 Ahed
Marish, 18, Palestinian hit by heavy-caliber gunfire from an Israeli
tank on Thursday as he was walking to his home near the Karni crossing between
Israel and the Gaza Strip. 2000 Ahmed Awad, 41,
Palestinian, by Israeli gunfire in a clash near the town of Tulkarem In
the West Bank. The Israeli military said Palestinians fired at an army vehicle,
and soldiers fired back. Palestinians said that Awad was in his house when
he was shot.

^2000 Al Gross, 82, inventor of the
walkie-talkie and a father of wireless communication, in Sun City
Arizona When Gross, who was born
in Toronto and grew up in Cleveland, demonstrated his prototype pager
at a medical conference in 1956, it flopped. Doctors told him they
didn't want to be bothered during their golf games. Decades later,
it delighted him to see such wide use of cellular phones and pagers,
a technological offshoot from his first devices. He earned a degree
in electrical engineering at Cleveland's Case School of Applied Science,
now Case Western Reserve University. Seeing the potential for walkie-talkies,
the military recruited Gross into the Office of Strategic Services,
the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. There he developed
a ground-to-air, battery-operated radio that could transmit up to
50 km. The device is credited with saving lives during World War II.
After the war, he formed the
Citizens Radio Corp. in Cleveland to produce two-way radios for the
public. His successful gave Gross the freedom and money to continue
inventing. In 1949 he devised the first wireless pager.
Gross' ideas, for which he held many patents, were so far advanced
that most expired before the world was ready for his inventions, and
he didn't make much money. I was born 35 years too soon," he
once told the Arizona Republic. If I still had the patents on
my inventions, Bill Gates would have to stand aside for me.

Pan
Am Flight 103 from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie,
Scotland, an hour after departure. A bomb that had been hidden inside
an audio cassette player detonated inside the cargo area when the
plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. All 259 passengers, including
38 Syracuse University students returning home for the holidays, were
killed in the explosion. In addition, 11 residents of Lockerbie were
killed in the shower of airplane parts that unexpectedly fell from
the sky. Authorities accused
Islamic terrorists of having placed the bomb on the plane while it
was at the low-security airport in Frankfurt, Germany. They apparently
believed that the attack was in retaliation for either the 1986 bombing
attack on Libya in which Gadhafi was the target, or a 1988 incident,
in which the United States killed 290 passengers when it mistakenly
shot down an Iran Air commercial flight over the Persian Gulf.
Sixteen days before the explosion over
Lockerbie, a call was made to the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland,
warning that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt.
Though some claimed that travelers should have been alerted to this
threat, US officials later said that the connection between the call
and the bomb was purely coincidental.
In the early 1990s, investigators identified Libyan intelligence agents
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah as suspects,
but Libya refused to turn them over to be tried in the United States.
But in 1999--in an effort to ease United Nations sanctions against
Libya--Colonel Moammar Gadhafi agreed to turn the suspects over to
Scotland for trial in the Netherlands using Scottish law and prosecutors.

Pan Am "Flight 103"explodes
over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 -- In the evening of December
21st. 1988 flight Pan Am 103 exploded and pieces of the plane fell
onto the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 259 people on the plane
and 11 people on the ground. -- Pan Am 103 climbed into the dark English
sky at 6:25 in the evening on December 21, 1988. It headed northwest
from London's Heathrow Airport toward Scotland and the North Sea and,
ultimately, scheduled destinations in New York and Detroit. The Jumbo
Jet carried 259 passengers and crew. The majority were Americans,
many of them returning for holiday gatherings with family and friends.
But just 38 minutes into the flight, as the 747 cruised at 31,000
feet over the border from England into Scotland, something in the
cargo hold exploded. It blew a hole the size of a large dinner plate
in the airliner's skin. The loss of air pressure caused a powerful
rush that broke the plane to pieces. Six miles below, in the Scottish
border town of Lockerbie a wing of the 747 fell directly on three
houses, creating a fireball that burned so hot it vaporized the homes
and the eleven people inside them. 189
of the victims were Americans The
average passenger age was 27 — dozens of students returning
home from studying abroad.
Marion Alderman Jablonski of Rome, N.Y., can remember the enormity
of all those racks of goods, the way Thomson handed her a blue dress
worn by her daughter, Paula.
Anna Marie Miazga, from Marcy. Anna Marie began weeping. She wore
a photo of her daughter Suzanne, an SU student,
, Patricia Brunner. Pat is from suburban Buffalo. Her daughter Colleen,
of Oswego State, was a passenger on Pan Am Rosemary
Wolfe, of Alexandria, Va., whose 20-year-old stepdaughter, Miriam,
died Kathleen Flynn of Montville,
N.J., whose son, John Patrick Flynn, was returning on Flight 103 from
a European study program. Syracuse,
N.Y., which lost 35 college students in the crash. 35 Syracuse University
students said Susan Cohen of
Cape May Court House, N.J., the mother of 20-year-old Theodora Cohen,
who died in the crash of Flight 103. Paul
Hudson, a New York lawyer whose 16-year-old daughter, Melina, died
on Pan Am 103. Melina was a high-school exchange student on her way
home from Exeter Across the Atlantic,
in the English Midlands, parents of another young victim were equally
devastated. Flora Swire was a gifted and vivacious 23-year-old medical
student flying to New York to visit her American boyfriend when she
died on Pan Am 103. Peter Lowenstein,
a New Jersey businessman, lost his son Alex

At approximately 7:03 p.m., Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over the Scottish
city of Lockerbie, killing all 259 people aboard the plane. Fragments
of the plane are scattered around the Lockerbie area, and several
large pieces crash into residential homes and buildings in the city,
killing eleven people on the ground. The 747 jumbo jet was on its
way from Frankfurt to New York via London, and was flying at 9500
m when the explosion occurred. The subsequent investigation by American
and Scottish authorities indicates that the blast was caused by a
bomb smuggled into the aircraft within a portable radio. Heathrow
Airport in London soon comes under fire for its ineffective security
measures and the US State Department offers a $400'000 reward for
the capture of the terrorists responsible. In November of 1991, US
and British investigators simultaneously name Abdel Baset Ali Megrahi
and Lamen Kalifa Fhima, two Libyans, as the key suspects in the case.
The men were working as airline officials in the office of Libyan
Arab Airlines at Luqa International Airport in Malta at the time of
the incident, and the prosecutors believe that they could have smuggled
the bomb through the luggage transferring system. The US State Department
subsequently offers a four-million-dollar reward for the capture of
the suspects dead or alive, although there is considerable criticism
from the Western media and other groups about the quality of the investigation
and its findings. For years,
Libyan dictator Ghaddafi refuses to surrender the two suspects, but,
hoping to get lifted the resulting sanctions against his country,
finally agrees that they be tried by a Scottish court sitting in the
Netherlands. On 31 January 2001, that court would convict Abdel Baset
Ali Megrahi and acquit Lamen Kalifa Fhima.

^1975 Three people killed in attack on OPEC Headquarters
led by Carlos the Jackal
In Vienna, Austria, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal,"
leads Arab terrorists on a raid of a meeting of oil ministers from
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The terrorists
storm in with machine guns, kill three people, and take seventy people
hostage, including eleven OPEC ministers. The group, calling themselves
the "Arm of the Arab Revolution," demand that an anti-Zionist political
statement that they had prepared be read on radio stations across
the Middle East. The Austrian government subsequently agrees to negotiate
with the terrorists, and eventually allows the terrorists to travel
with their hostages to Algeria, where the eleven OPEC ministers and
their staff are released unharmed. In 1949, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez
was born the son of a millionaire Marxist lawyer in Caracas, Venezuela,
and attended Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow where he first became
involved with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. During
the 1970s and early 1980s, he acted as a freelance terrorist for various
Arab groups, and is alleged to have killed as many as eighty people
in a chain of bombings, hijackings, and assassinations. Among the
famous terrorists attacks he is linked to are the 1972 massacre of
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the 1975 seizure of OPEC
oil ministers, the 1976 Palestinian hijacking of a French jetliner
to Entebbe, Uganda, and half-a-dozen attacks on French targets. Nearly
apprehended on several occasions, Carlos the Jackal manages to evade
international authorities until 1994, when French agents capture him
hiding in the Sudan. Secretly extradited to France, he is sent to
a French prison where he spends three years before being put on trial
in 1997 for the 1974 Paris murders of two French secret agents and
a pro-Palestinian Lebanese turned informer. On December 23, 1997,
a French jury finds Sanchez guilty, and he is sentenced to life imprisonment.

^1945 George S. Patton, Jr., 60, the
audacious and eccentric American general, dies in a hospital in Heidelberg,
Germany, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident near Mannheim.
Born in San Gabriel, California, in 1885, Patton, whose family had
a long history of military service, Patton graduated from the West
Point Military Academy in 1909. He represented the United States in
the 1912 Olympics--as the first American participant in the pentathlon.
He did not win a medal. During World War I, he served as a tank officer
in France, and these experiences, along with his extensive military
study, made Patton a dedicated proponent of tank warfare.
During World War II, as commander of the US 7th Army, he captured
Palermo, Sicily, in 1943 by just such means. Patton's audacity became
evident in 1944, when, during the Battle of the Bulge, he employed
an unorthodox strategy that involved a 90-degree pivoting move of
his 3rd Army forces, enabling him to speedily relieve the besieged
Allied defenders of Bastogne, Belgium.
Along the way, Patton's mouth proved as dangerous to his career as
the Germans. When he berated and slapped a hospitalized soldier diagnosed
with "shell shock," but whom Patton accused of "malingering," the
press turned on him, and pressure was applied to cut him down to size.
He might have found himself enjoying early retirement had not General
Dwight Eisenhower and General George Marshall intervened on his behalf.
After several months of inactivity, he was put back to work.
And work he did-at the Battle of the
Bulge, during which Patton once again succeeded in employing a complex
and quick-witted strategy, turning the German thrust into Bastogne
into an Allied counterthrust, driving the Germans east across the
Rhine. In March 1945, Patton's army swept through southern Germany
into Czechoslovakia-which he was stopped from capturing by the Allies,
out of respect for the Soviets' postwar political plans for Eastern
Europe. Patton had many gifts,
but diplomacy was not one of them. After the war, while stationed
in Germany, he criticized the process of denazification, the removal
of former Nazi Party members from positions of political, administrative,
and governmental power. His impolitic press statements questioning
the policy caused Eisenhower to remove him as US commander in Bavaria.
He was transferred to the 15th Army Group, but in December of 1945
he suffered a broken neck in a car accident and died less than two
weeks later. --
After the American entrance into World War II, Patton, who been placed
in command of an important US tank division, played a key role in
the Allied invasion of French North Africa in 1942. In 1943, Patton
led the US Seventh Army in its assault on Sicily, and in 1944 commanded
the US Third Army in the invasion of France. In December of 1944,
Patton's supreme expertise in military movement and tank warfare helped
crush the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes during the Battle
of the Bulge. Although Patton was one of the ablest American commanders
from World War II, he was also one of the most controversial. He presented
himself as a modern-day cavalryman, designed his own uniform, and
was known to make eccentric claims of his direct descent from great
military leaders of the past through reincarnation.
During the Sicilian campaign, Patton generated considerable controversy
when he accused a US soldier suffering from a psychological disorder
of being a coward, and then proceeded to strike the young man across
his face. The famously profane general was forced to issue a public
apology and was reprimanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. However,
when time for the invasion of Western Europe came, Eisenhower could
find no general as formidable as Patton, and the general was again
granted an important military post. During one of his many successful
campaigns, General Patton was once said to have declared, "compared
to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.

1941 Tomás Vargas Osorio, poeta y periodista colombiano.

^1940 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald,
US author, of a heart attack in Hollywood. He was born on 24 September
1896. His most brilliant novel is The Great Gatsby.Fitzgerald
was the only son of an unsuccessful, aristocratic father and an energetic,
provincial mother. Half the time he thought of himself as the heir
of his father's tradition, which included the author of “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key, after whom he was
named, and half the time as “straight 1850 potato-famine Irish.”
As a result he had typically ambivalent US feelings about US life,
which seemed to him at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising.
He also had an intensely romantic imagination, what he once called
“a heightened sensitivityto the promises of life,” and
he charged into experience determined to realize those promises. At
both St. Paul Academy (1908–1910) and Newman School (1911–1913)
he tried too hard and made himself unpopular, but at Princeton he
came close to realizing his dream of a brilliant success. He became
a prominent figure in the literary life of the university and made
lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He
became a leading figure inthe socially important Triangle Club, a
dramatic society, and was elected to one of the leadingclubs of the
university; he fell in love with Ginevra King, one of the beauties
of her generation. Then he lost Ginevra and flunked out of Princeton.
He returned to Princeton the next fall, but he had now lost all the
positions he coveted, and in November 1917 he left to join the army.
In July 1918, while he was stationed near Montgomery, Ala., he met
Zelda Sayre [24 Jul 1900 – 10 Mar 1948], the daughter of an
Alabama Supreme Court judge. They fell deeply in love, and, as soon
as he could, Fitzgerald headed for New York determined to achieve
instant success and to marry Zelda. What he achieved was an advertising
job at $90 a month. Zelda broke their engagement, and, after an epic
drunk, Fitzgerald retired to St. Paul to rewrite for the second time
a novel he had begun at Princeton. In the spring of 1920 it was published,
he married Zelda, and “riding in a taxi one afternoon between
very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because
I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.” Immature though it seems today,
This Side of Paradise in 1920 was a revelation of the new
morality of the young; it made Fitzgerald famous. This fame opened
to him magazines of literary prestige, such as Scribner's, and high-paying
popular ones, such as The Saturday Evening Post. This sudden
prosperity made it possible for him and Zelda to play the roles theywere
so beautifully equipped for, and Ring Lardner called them the prince
and princess of their generation. Though they loved these roles, they
were frightened by them, too, as shown by the ending of Fitzgerald's
second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which describes
a handsome young man and his beautiful wife, who gradually degenerate
into a shopworn middle age while they wait for the young man to inherit
a large fortune. Ironically, they finally get it, when there is nothing
of them left worth preserving.
To escape the life that they feared might bring them to this end,
the Fitzgeralds (together with their daughter, Frances, called “Scottie,”
born in 1921) moved in 1924 to the Riviera, where they found themselves
a part of a group of US expatriates whose style was largely set by
Gerald Murphy [25 Mar 1888 – 17 Oct 1964] and Sara Wiborg Murphy
[07Nov 1883 – 10 Oct 1975]; Fitzgerald described this society
in his last completed novel, Tender Is the Night, and modeled
its hero on Gerald Murphy. Shortly after their arrival in France,
Fitzgerald completed his most brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby
(1925). All of his divided nature is in this novel, the naive Midwesterner
afire with the possibilities of the “American Dream” in
its hero, Jay Gatsby, and the compassionate Princeton gentleman in
its narrator, Nick Carraway. The Great Gatsby is the most
profoundly US novel of its time; at its conclusion, Fitzgerald connects
Gatsby's dream, his “Platonic conception of himself,”
with the dream of the discoverers of America. Some of Fitzgerald's
finest short stories appeared in All the Sad Young Men (1926),
particularly “The Rich Boy” and “Absolution,”
but it was not until eight years later that another novel appeared.
The next decade of the Fitzgeralds'
lives was disorderly and unhappy. Fitzgerald began to drink too much,
and Zelda suddenly, ominously, began to practice ballet dancing night
and day. In 1930 she had a mental breakdown and in 1932 another, from
which she never fully recovered. Through the 1930s they fought to
save their life together, and, when the battle was lost, Fitzgerald
said, “I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that
led to Zelda's sanitarium.” He did not finish his next novel,
Tender Is the Night, until 1934. It is the story of a psychiatrist
who marries one of his patients, who, as she slowly recovers, exhausts
his vitality until he is, in Fitzgerald's words, un homme épuisé.
Though technically faulty and commercially unsuccessful, this is Fitzgerald's
most moving book. With its failure
and his despair over Zelda, Fitzgerald was close to becoming an incurable
alcoholic. By 1937, however, he had come back far enough to become
a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and there he met and fell in love with
Sheilah Graham, a famous Hollywood gossip columnist. For the rest
of his life Fitzgerald lived quietly with her, except for occasional
drunken spells when he became bitter and violent. Occasionally he
went east to visit Zelda or his daughter Scottie, who entered Vassar
College in 1938. In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood,
The Last Tycoon. The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is
based on that of the producer Irving Thalberg. This is Fitzgerald's
final attempt to create his dream of the promises of American life
and of the kind of man who could realize them. In the intensity with
which it is imagined and in the brilliance of its expression, it is
the equal of anything Fitzgerald ever wrote, and it is typical of
his luck that he died of a heart attack with his novel only half-finished.
F.
Scott Fitzgerald, auteur étatsunien de romans
et de nouvelles qui mettent en scène l'ambiance et les mœurs
des années 1920, qu'il appelait "l'âge du Jazz", à
Saint-Paul dans le Minnesota.
À l'université de Princeton, il délaissa les
études classiques pour suivre l'enseignement d'écrivains
et de critiques comme Edmund Wilson, auquel il resta lié toute
sa vie. En 1917, il quitta Princeton pour devenir officier dans l'armée.
C'est dans les camps d'entraînement de l'armée qu'il
procéda à la révision de son premier roman, intitulé
d'abord "l'Égoïste romantique", et publié finalement
sous le titre de This
Side of Paradise (1920). Alors qu'il se trouvait dans un
camp en Alabama, Fitzgerald tomba amoureux de Zelda Sayre, parfait
archétype de la jeune fille fantasque et délurée
de l'époque, figure qui deviendra un élément
essentiel de la fiction fitzgéraldienne. This
Side of Paradise, publié au printemps de 1920, fit
de Fitzgerald un homme riche, assez riche tout au moins pour épouser
la très mondaine Zelda. Dans ce roman autobiographique, la
lost generation, celle de l'après-guerre, totalement désabusée,
trouva un reflet de ses rêves brisés, de ses incertitudes
et de la vacuité de son existence.
L'ouvrage suivant, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), un roman
d'atmosphère qui dépeint les angoisses et la débauche
d'un couple aisé hanté par le pressentiment de la chute
prochaine, reçut un accueil plus mitigé. En revanche,
les nouvelles de Fitzgerald connaissaient un grand succès,
et leurs revenus permettaient d'assurer l'extravagant train de vie
de Zelda, entre hôtels de luxe et événements mondains.
Sur plus de cent cinquante histoires, l'auteur en retint quarante-six
pour les publier dans quatre recueils, parmi lesquels The Children
of Jazz (1920) et A Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1935).
En 1924, les Fitzgerald quittèrent
Long Island pour se rendre sur la Côte d'Azur, et ne revinrent
s'installer aux États-Unis qu'en 1931. En cinq mois, Fitzgerald
acheva The Great Gatsby (1925), fable sensible et satirique
sur la quête effrénée de la réussite et
l'effondrement du rêve américain. Bien que généralement
considéré comme son chef-d'œuvre, The Great
Gatsby se vendit mal, ce qui contribua à accélérer
la ruine de sa vie personnelle. Zelda sombrait dans la folie (elle
fut hospitalisée plusieurs fois de 1930 à sa mort en
1948) et lui dans l'alcoolisme. Il n'en continua pas moins d'écrire,
essentiellement pour des magazines. Ce n'est qu'en 1934 que parut
son quatrième roman Tender Is the Night, l'histoire
à peine voilée, presque la confession, de sa vie avec
Zelda. L'accueil très froid qui lui fut réservé
accéléra la déchéance de Fitzgerald, déchéance
qu'il décrivit lui-même dans The Crack-Up (1945).
Fitzgerald, partiellement remis, devint scénariste à
Hollywood en 1937, une expérience qui lui inspira son dernier
roman, l'un des plus aboutis, The Last Tycoon (1941). Devant
l'éclat et l'intelligence de ce livre, pourtant inachevé
à la mort de Fitzgerald la nuit du 20 au 21 décembre
1940, les critiques révisèrent leur jugement à
l'encontre de son auteur, reconnu aujourd'hui comme l'un des plus
brillants écrivains américains du XXème siècle.
Other works of Fitzgerald:
Short stories. Flappers and Philosophers (1920); Tales
of the Jazz Age (1922); All the Sad Young Men (1926),
includes "The Rich Boy" and "Absolution"; Taps at Reveille
(1935). Letters. Letters (1963).

^1939 Day 22 of Winter War: USSR aggression against
Finland. [Talvisodan 22. päivä]
More deaths due to Stalin's desire to grab Finnish territory.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin celebrates his 60th birthday today.
He will not get any part of Finland as a birthday present.

Terijoki: in honor of Stalin's birthday, Otto Wille Kuusinen's
'Finnish People's Government' holds a meeting and a parade of the
'Finnish People's Army'. The meeting sends a telegram congratulating
Stalin on his birthday. At the same time, enemy aircraft bomb two
passenger trains in southern Finland.

Southern Finland: enemy fighters strafe a stationary train on
the edge of the forest between Helsinki and Turku for 15 minutes,
killing three civilians.

Ladoga Karelia: Finnish troops in the Tolvajärvi sector launch
an assault in the evening to retake the village of Ägläjärvi.
The determined assaults by the Finnish strike force of five battalions
overcome the main force of the Russian division.

Civil defense officials point out that lighting restrictions also
apply to Christmas lights. This means, for example, that candles
must not be placed beside graves this year, and outdoor Christmas
trees must not be illuminated. People should also remember to stay
off the streets during air-raid warnings.

1933 Knud Rasmussen, explorador danés.1929
Henry Herbert La Thangue, English painter born on born on 19 January
1859.  MORE
LA THANGUE AT ART 4 DECEMBERwith
links to images.1924 Jean André Rixens, French
artist born on 30 November 1846. — more
with links to images.1917 Wilhelm Heinrich Trübner,
German artist born on 03 February 1851.1912 Paul
Gordan, 75, mathematician. 1912 Lemoine,
mathematician.1894 Ramón Martí y Alsina,
Spanish artist born in 1826.1879 William Jamps Shayer Sr.,
British artist born in 1788. — a bit more
with link to an image. 1871 Paul Camille Guigou,
French painter born on 15 February 1834. — more
with link to an image.

^1866 Fetterman and 80 US soldiers,
in rare Amerindian victory.
Determined to challenge the growing American military presence in
their territory, Indians in northern Wyoming lure Lieutenant Colonel
William J. Fetterman and his soldiers into a deadly ambush on this
day in 1866. Tensions in the region started rising in 1863, when John
Bozeman blazed the Bozeman Trail, a new route for emigrants traveling
to the Montana gold fields. Bozeman's trail was of questionable legality
since it passed directly through hunting grounds that the government
had promised to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe in the Fort Laramie
Treaty of 1851. Thus when Colorado militiamen murdered more than two
hundred peaceful Cheyenne during the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864,
the Indians began to take revenge by attacking whites all across the
Plains, including the emigrants traveling the Bozeman Trail. The US
government responded by building a series of protective forts along
the trail; the largest and most important of these was Fort Phil Kearney,
erected in 1866 in north-central Wyoming.
Indians under the leadership of Red Cloud and Crazy Horse began to
focus their attacks on Fort Phil Kearney, constantly harassing the
soldiers and raiding their wood and supply parties. On December 6,
1866, Crazy Horse discovered to his surprise that he could lead a
small detachment of soldiers into a fatal ambush by dismounting from
his horse and fleeing as if he were defenseless. Struck by the foolish
impulsiveness of the soldiers, Crazy Horse and Red Cloud reasoned
that perhaps a much larger force could be lured into a similar deadly
trap. On the bitterly
cold morning of December 21, about 2000 Indians concealed themselves
along the road just north of Fort Phil Kearney. A small band made
a diversionary attack on a party of woodcutters from the fort, and
commandant Colonel Henry Carrington quickly ordered Colonel Fetterman
to go to their aid with a company of 80 troopers. Crazy Horse and
10 decoy warriors then rode into view of the fort. When Carrington
fired an artillery round at them, the decoys ran away as if frightened.
The party of woodcutters made it safely back to the fort, but Colonel
Fetterman and his men chased after the fleeing Crazy Horse and his
decoys, just as planned. The soldiers rode straight into the ambush
and were wiped out in a massive attack during which some 40,000 arrows
rained down on the hapless troopers. None of them survived.
With 81 fatalities, the so-called Fetterman
Massacre was the army's worst defeat in the West until the Battle
of Little Bighorn in 1876. Further Indian attacks eventually forced
the army to reconsider its commitment to protecting the Bozeman Trail,
and in 1868 the military abandoned the forts and pulled out. It was
one of only a handful of clear Indian victories in the Plains Indian
Wars. On 14 May 1861 William
Fetterman joins the US Army William Fetterman, who will later lead
80 of his soldiers to their deaths at the hands of the Sioux, joins
the Union Army. By all accounts, Fetterman was a born fighting man.
During the Civil War he served with distinction and received at least
two battlefield promotions in recognition of his gallantry. Like his
better-known comrade George Custer, Fetterman emerged from the Civil
War with an unwavering confidence in himself and his military abilities.
Moreover, like Custer, his overconfidence eventually proved to be
his undoing. After the Civil War, Fetterman was assigned to Fort Phil
Kearny in northern Wyoming. Phil Kearny was the most important of
a series of forts that the US Army constructed to defend the Bozeman
Trail, a wagon road that branched northwest from the Oregon Trail
to the gold fields of Virginia City, Montana. The route violated Sioux
hunting grounds, and Sioux warriors under Chief Red Cloud attacked
travelers and soldiers alike in protest. Fort Phil Kearny was an impressive
compound nearly the size of three football fields. The tall wooden
stockade around the fort made it nearly impregnable to Indian attack,
but the stockade also proved to be the fort's Achilles' heel. In order
to maintain the 2800-foot wooden stockade and provide firewood for
the bitter Wyoming winters, soldiers traveled several miles from the
fort to reach the nearest forests. Frequently, small bands of Sioux
attacked the group of soldiers assigned to the "wood train," though
casualties had not yet been severe. When attacked, the soldiers quickly
took up a strong defensive position behind their circled wagons. The
sound of shots alerted the fort of an attack, and the Sioux fled as
soon as rescue squads arrived. Soon after Captain Fetterman arrived
at the fort in November 1866, he began to argue for troops to pursue
and wipe out the Indians who attacked the wood trains. Though he had
no significant experience fighting Indians, he regarded them as contemptuous
cowards who would be no match for well-trained American troops. He
often boasted that with 80 men he could travel through the heart of
the Sioux Nation with impunity. Fetterman began openly ridiculing
the commander of the fort, Colonel Henry Carrington, for failing to
chase down and destroy the Sioux. Carrington, however, had come to
suspect the Sioux attacks were only feints designed to lure the larger
rescue squad into an ambush and he forbade his officers to pursue
the fleeing Indians. Impetuous and overconfident, Fetterman dismissed
Carrington's fears. On December 21, 1866, a small band of Indians
again attacked the wood train. Carrington ordered Fetterman and 80
soldiers to its relief, but historians dispute whether Carrington
explicitly ordered Fetterman not to pursue the Indians that day. Fetterman
and his men chased after the Indians, failing to notice that they
seemed to be fleeing with a deliberate slowness. The decoys-one of
whom was a young brave named Crazy Horse-led the soldiers straight
into an ambush of almost 2,000 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe warriors.
Fetterman and all of his soldiers were dead within 40 minutes. The
Fetterman Massacre, as it came to be called, was the worst disaster
suffered by the US Army in the Plains Indian War until the Battle
of Little Big Horn in 1876.

^1991 The Commonwealth of Independent States replaces
the USSR. In
a final step signifying the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, 11
of the 12 Soviet republics declare that they are forming the Commonwealth
of Independent States (CIS). Just a few days later, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev announced he was stepping down from his position.
The Soviet Union ceased to exist.
The 11 republics--Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine,
and Uzbekistan-signed an agreement creating the CIS. Only Georgia,
embroiled in a civil war, abstained from participation. Exactly what
they created was open to debate. The CIS was not a new nation, but
merely an "alliance" between independent states. The political meaning
of the alliance was hazy. The independent states each took over the
former Soviet government facilities within their borders. The military
side of the CIS was even more confusing. They agreed to sustain any
arms agreements signed by the former Soviet Union. The former Soviet
defense minister would retain control over the military until the
CIS could agree on what to do with the nuclear weapons and conventional
forces within their borders. Complicating the situation were terrific
economic problems and outbreaks of ethnic violence in the new republics.
For Gorbachev, the announcement was the final signal that his power-and
the existence of the Soviet Union-was at an end. Four days later,
on Christmas Day, he announced his resignation.

1960 Manolo Tena, cantante, compositor, letrista y escritor
español.1949 Thomas Sankara, político
y militar de Burkina Faso. [ce n'est PAS 100 carats]1937
The Lincoln Tunnel is opened to traffic, allowing motorists to
drive between New Jersey and Manhattan beneath the Hudson River. 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first,
full-length, animated movie feature (by Walt Disney) debuts
1932 Ringrose,
mathematician.1918 Kurt Waldheim, minor Nazi, 4th
UN Secretary-General (1972-81), Austrian President.1917 Heinrich
Boll Germany, writer (Group Portrait with Lady, Nobel '72) 1913 First crossword puzzle in a newspaper: in The
New York World Sunday edition.1905 Anthony Powell
England, novelist (Infants of the Spring) 1904 Jean René
Bazaine, French artist who died in 1995.1893 Winifred
Nicholson, British artist who died in 1981. — more
with links to images. 1892 Dame Rebecca West journalist/novelist/critic/feminist
(or 12/25). WEST ONLINE: The
Return of the Soldier 1891 John W McCormack
(D) Speaker of the US House of Representatives (1962-70)
1879 (09 December Julian) Ioseb Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili "Stalin",
Gori, Georgia; Soviet dictator from 1924; he murdered 11'000'000. Stalin
died on 05 March 1953. 1879 Et
Dukkehjem (A
Doll's House), by Henrik
Ibsen [20 March 1828  23 May 1906], is first performed in Copenhagen,
Denmark, with a revised happy ending. [A
Doll's House at another site]1878 Lukasiewicz,
mathematician.1874 Josep Maria Sert i Badia, Catalán
painter who died on 27 November 1945.  MORE
ON SERT AT ART 4 DECEMBERwith
links to images. 1874 Juan Bautista Sacasa President
of Nicaragua (1932-1936)1874 Lynn
Joseph Frazier, who would be a farmer, elected governor (Republican)
of North Dakota in 1927, narrowly lost a recall election in 1921, was elected
US Senator three times, serving from 1923 to 1941. He would die on 11 January
1947. 1872 Albert Payson Terhune US, novelist.
TERHUNE ONLINE: Bruce,
Further
Adventures of Lad, His
Dog 1859 Gustave Kahn France, poet (claimed
to have invented vers libre)1857 Francisco Aguilera Egea,
militar español.1840 Manuel Domínguez Sánchez,
Spanish painter.1838 La
Chartreuse de Parme, novela, es terminada por Stendhal. 1823 Jean Henri Fabre France, entomologist (insects &
spiders)1815 Thomas Couture, French Academic painter
who died on 30 March 1879.  MORE
ON COUTURE AT ART 4 DECEMBERwith
links to images. 1804 Benjamin Disraeli Dizzy,
born in England to a Jewish family of Italian origin. But, at the age when
he would have been expected to have his Bar Mitzvah, he was baptized into
the Church of England on 31 July 1817, after his father quarreled with his
synagogue (had Benjamin remained a Jew he would have been barred from British
politics). British statesman and novelist who was the favorite prime minister
of Queen Victoria (twice: 1868, 1874-80) implacable adversary of the Liberal
party leader William E. Gladstone (29 Dec 1809  19 May 1898)
[whom Disraeli would have been glad to see turned to stone]. Disraeli provided
the Conservative Party with a twofold policy of Tory democracy and imperialism.
He died on 19 April 1881.  DISRAELI ONLINE: Sybil,
or, The Two Nations1772 François-Louis-Thomas
Francia, Calais French painter and engraver who died on 06 February
1839. — a bit more
with links to images.1759 Pierre-François Delaunay
(or Delauney), French artist who died on 26 August 1789.1701
Guillaume Thomas Raphaël Taraval, French artist who died in
1750.

^1639 Jean Baptiste Racine (birth date
guessed: baptism 22 December 1639) (dramatist: Alexandre, Andromaque,
Les Plaideurs, Britannicus, Berenice, Bajazet, Mithridate, etc.).
(RACINE ONLINE:)
French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery
of French classical tragedy. His reputation rests on the plays he
wrote between 1664 and 1677, notably Andromaque
(1667), Britannicus
(1669), Bérénice
(1670), Bajazet
(1672), and Phèdre
(1677). Racine's first play,
Amasie, was never produced and has not survived. His career
as a dramatist began with the production by Molière's troupe
of his play La
Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis at the
Palais-Royal Theatre on 20 June 1664. Molière's troupe also
produced Racine's next play, Alexandre
le Grand, which premiered at the Palais Royal on 4 December
1665. Thereafter all of Racine's secular tragedies would be presented
by the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, more skilled in tragedy.
Racine followed up his first
masterpiece, Andromaque (1667), with the comedy Les
Plaideurs (1668) before returning to tragedy with two plays
set in imperial Rome, Britannicus
(1669) and Bérénice (1670). He situated Bajazet
(1672) in nearly contemporary Turkish history and depicted a famous
enemy of Rome in Mithridate
(1673) before returning to Greek mythology in Iphigénie
en Aulide (1674) and the play that was his crowning achievement,
Phèdre (1677). [Phèdre
in English translation] Racine
was the first French author to live principally on the income provided
by his writings. After Phèdre,
Racine left the theater to become a historiographer of Louis XIV,
publishing in 1682 Eloge historique du Roi sur ses conquêtes.
He also wrote Cantiques spirituels (1694). By
request from Louis XIV's consort Madame de Maintenon, Racine wrote
two religious plays for the convent girls at Saint-Cyr: Esther
(1689) and Athalie
(1691). Probably his last work was Abrégé
de l'histoire de Port-Royal. Racine died on 21 April 1699
from cancer of the liver. La
Thébaïde, presents two legitimate
pretenders who are also identical twins. The play centres on the twin
sons of Oedipus who slay one another in mortal combat, one defending,
the other attacking, their native city of Thebes. In
Andromaque (1667)
Racine replaced heroism with realism in a tragedy about the folly
and blindness of unrequited love among a chain of four characters.
The play is set in Epirus after the Trojan War. Pyrrhus vainly loves
his captive, the Trojan widow Andromache, and is in turn loved by
the Greek princess Hermione, who in her turn is loved by Orestes.
Power, intimidation, and emotional blackmail become the recourses
by which these characters try to transmit the depths of their feelings
to their beloved. But this form of communication is ultimately frustrated
because the characters' deep-seated insecurity renders them self-absorbed
and immune to empathy. Murder, suicide, and madness have destroyed
all of them except Andromache by the play's end. The
three-act comedy Les Plaideurs of 1668 offered Racine the
challenge of a new genre and the opportunity to demonstrate his skill
in Molière's privileged domain, as well as the occasion to
display his expertise in Greek, of which he had better command than
almost any nonprofessional classicist in France. The result, a brilliant
satire of the French legal system, was an adaptation of Aristophanes'
The Wasps that found much more favor at court than on the
Parisian stage. With Britannicus
(1669) Racine posed a direct challenge to Corneille's specialty: tragedy
with a Roman setting. Racine portrays the events leading up to the
moment when the teenage emperor Nero cunningly and ruthlessly frees
himself from the tutelage of his domineering mother, Agrippina, and
has Britannicus, a legitimate pretender to the throne, poisoned in
the course of a fatal banquet of fraternal reconciliation. Bérénice
(1670) marks the decisive point in Racine's theatrical career, for
with this play he found a felicitous combination of elements that
he would use, without radical alteration, for the rest of his secular
tragedies: a love interest, a relatively uncomplicated plot, striking
rhetorical passages, and a highly poetic use of time. Bérénice
is built around the unusual premise of three characters who are ultimately
forced to live apart because of their virtuous sense of duty. In the
play, Titus, who is to become the new Roman emperor, and his friend
Antiochus are both in love with Berenice, the queen of Palestine.
Racine followed the simplicity
of Bérénice and its three main characters with
a violent, relatively crowded production, Bajazet (1672).
The play's themes of unrequited love and the struggle for power under
the unrelenting pressure of time are recognizably Racinian, but its
locale, the court of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, is the
only contemporary setting used by Racine in any of his plays, and
was sufficiently far removed in distance and in mores from 17th-century
France to create an alluring exoticism for contemporary audiences.
In the play, the main characters--the young prince Bajazet, his beloved
Atalide, and the jealous sultana Roxane--are the mortal victims of
the despotic cruelty of the absent sultan Amurat, whose reign is maintained
by violence and secrecy. In 1673
Racine presented Mithridate,
which featured a return to tragedy with a Roman background. Mithradates
VI, the king of Pontus, is the aging, jealous rival of his sons for
the Greek princess Monime. The rivalry between the two brothers themselves
for the love of their father's fiancée is another manifestation
of the primordial tragic situation for Racine, that of warring brothers.
Against the backdrop of this conflict, the play presents the demise
of King Mithradates, who becomes conscious of his own eclipse as a
heroic figure feared by Rome.
Despite a competing play mounted by his enemies on the same general
subject, Racine's Iphigénie en Aulide (1674) was a
resounding success that confirmed him as the unrivaled master of French
theatre. It is an adaptation of a play by Euripides about the prospective
sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but contains a happy
ending in which Iphigénie is spared. Racine's deft insertion
in Iphigénie en Aulide of the future as an intrusive
force determining the present creates a rehearsal of the Trojan War
that culminates in a profound moral illumination revolving around
the title character. The play's dénouement, typical of Racine's
practice, projects the imagination of the spectator beyond the present
action to the future consequences of the acts portrayed on stage.Phèdre
(1677) is Racine's supreme accomplishment because of the rigor and
simplicity of its organization, the emotional power of its language,
and the profusion of its images and meanings. Racine presents Phèdre
as consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson, Hippolytus.
Receiving false information that her husband, King Theseus, is dead,
Phèdre declares her love to Hippolytus, who is horrified. Theseus
returns and is falsely informed that Hippolytus has been the aggressor
toward Phèdre. Theseus invokes the aid of the god Neptune to
destroy his son, after which Phèdre kills herself out of guilt
and sorrow. A structural pattern of cycles and circles in Phèdre
reflects a conception of human existence as essentially changeless,
recurrent, and therefore asphyxiatingly tragic. Phèdre's own
desire to flee the snares of passion repeatedly prompts her to contemplate
a voluntary exile. References to ancient Greek mythological figures
and to a wide range of geographical places lend a vast, cosmic dimension
to the moral itinerary of Phèdre as she suffers bitterly from
her incestuous propensities and a sense of her own degradation. Phèdre
constitutes a daring representation of the contagion of sin and its
catastrophic results.Esther
(1689) is a biblical tragedy complete with musical choral interludes
composed by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who would serve in this same role
for Racine's last play, Athalie. The play shows how Esther, the wife
of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes I), saves the Jews from a massacre
plotted by the king's chief minister, Haman. With its three acts,
its chorus, and its transcendent message that God and truth can be
made manifest on stage, Esther breaks sharply with Racine's
previous practice in tragedy. It is not one of his major works, despite
the beauty of its choruses. In
Athalie (1691) Racine
reverted to his customary approach. Within the one day that is always
the temporal duration of his plays, a situation of human origin must
be resolved by divine intervention so that the child Joas, the rightful
king of Judah, will be saved from his murderous grandmother Athalie.
Athalie is a typical Racinian drama except for the fact that
fate is replaced in this instance by divine providence. The title
character, Athalie, though evil, still remains admirable in her titanic
struggle against this superior adversary. Of all the characters never
seen on stage but who enrich Racine's texts, from Hector and Astyanax
in Andromaque through Venus, Minos, Neptune, and Ariane in
Phèdre, the God of the Old Testament in Athalie
exerts the greatest impact on the course of dramatic events.
Racine's art has influenced French
and foreign authors alike, among them Émile Zola, Marcel Proust,
François Mauriac, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett.

ENIGMATICAL PROPHECIES[from the 1736
Almanack, with the original spelling].Which
they that do not understand, cannot well explain.1. Before the middle
of this year, a wind at N. East will arise, during which the water of
the sea and rivers will be in such manner raised, that great part of
the towns of Boston, Newport, New-York, Philadelphia, the low lands
of Maryland and Virginia, and the town of Charlstown in
South Carolina, will be under water. Happy will it be for the sugar
and salt, standing in the cellars of those places, if there be tight roofs
and cielings overhead; otherwise, without being a conjurer, a man may easily
foretel that such commodities will receive damage.
2. About the middle of the year, great numbers
of vessels fully laden will be taken out of the ports aforesaid, by a Power
with which we are not now at war, and whose forces shall not be descried
or seen either coming or going. But in the end this may not be disadvantageous
to those places.3. However, not long
after, a visible army of 30000 musketers will land, some in Virginia and
Maryland, and some in the lower counties on both sides of Delaware, who
will over-run the country, and sorely annoy the inhabitants; but the air
in this climate will agree with them so ill towards winter, that they will
die in the beginning of cold weather like rotten sheep, and by Christmas
the inhabitants will get the better of them.[These
3 prophecies, reproduced in This Day in History for yesterday, did indeed
come to pass, but Franklin's readers had to wait one year for the 1737 Almanack
to understand them. I will not make you wait that long, Here is Franklin's
1737 explanation of the first prophecy. For the other two, make sure you
read This Day in History for the next few days.]
In my last I published some enigmatical prophecies, which I did not expect
any one would take for serious predictions. The explanation I promised,
follows, viz.
1. The water of the sea and rivers i raised
in vapours by the sun, is form'd into clouds in the air, and thence descends
in rain. Now when there is rain overhead, (which frequently happens when
the wind is at N.E.) the cities and places on the earth below, are certainly
under water.2. The power with which we were
not then at war, but which, it was said, would take many full laden
vessels out of our ports before the end of the year, is the WIND, whose
forces also are not descried either coming or going.